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Daily Links: Ask Tim Ferriss about His 4-Hour Work Week

Monday’s interview with Adam Shepard was the first installment of an irregular series here at Get Rich Slowly. Since starting the site, I’ve wanted to interview people about money. Not just money gurus, but average people, people like you and me. As I move closer to blogging full-time, this dream can become a reality. If you have some suggestions for future interview subjects, please let me know.

In the meantime, my second interview will be with Tim Ferriss, author of the phenomenally successful The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. When I reviewed the book last August, I wrote that Ferriss’ ideas were “like a kick in the head”. I meant that in a good way. Though there were sections of the book I didn’t like, the good far outweighed the bad. The book challenged me, and continues to provide inspiration as I pursue non-traditional work.

Speaking of non-traditional work, here’s an old article that I only discovered today. On Halloween 2004, Penelope Trunk listed 7 ways to decrease your hours without harming your career. Her top advice? Concentrate on quality of work over quantity. “The person who builds a career on doing the most work commits to living on a treadmill…Quality is what matters.”

Given all of the various learnings (both favorable and unfavorable) in The Game of Life, my wife and I spend much of the game talking our kids through the various money issues we’re confronted with. We’re careful not to be over-bearing (it’s a game after all — we’re trying to have fun)…As such, we’ve seen that Life can be a great way to teach kids (or anyone else) about personal finance issues.

Finally, Re-Nest has a fun article describing how to make a one-pot indoor herb garden. Kris and I love to grow our own food. We’ve never tried container gardening, but this $30 project is a great way for the uninitiated to give home gardening a shot.

I loved the “stop dreaming and do it” attitude of the book. But he comes from a starting point of already having a successful company and his goal was for it to not consume him. This doesn’t speak much to the majority of us who are trying to reach a point where we can keep afloat without selling our souls to the 9-to-5 gods. Would love to hear his thoughts on how to achieve freedom without that starting point…

I’ve outsourced several design and programming jobs to providers in India and China – jobs that would cost me 10 times as much to have produced in my backyard, or take me literally thousands of hours to accomplish myself.

I agree with Ferriss’ contention that entrepreneurs in ‘developed’ nations should probably outsource as much as they can provided it’s economically viable and the quality of work produced is high, and those who consider this as somehow exploitative lack a fundamental understanding of economics, even if their hearts are in the right place.

Having said that, I most certainly don’t agree with the idea that the ultimate goal of outsourcing is for the outsourcer to work any less hard than he or she would otherwise. The idea of using cheap foreign labour simply as a means to work a 4 hour work week borders on the offensive.

I would like to know how Ferriss deals with international taxes? If I become a freelance professional and obtain contracts in other countries, how can I ensure that I still remain on track with my state’s fiscal system ?

I know that I probably don’t have the knowledge and should definitly ask the experts. But it will probably cost a fortune and I won’t be able to outsource my canadian accounting to India…

I’d like to know more about how he started the business that paid him over $70,000 per month, BrainQUICKEN. How did he find suppliers? He didn’t have his book as a reference, so how did he get to his current point?

Love the book! My hubby and I recently read it and have found it really inspiring. We are puzzled however about how we can really apply many of the ideas when we have two small children. Not only do they require a stable living situation, but great schooling as well. We think that means private school, and that is going to max out our income. How can we take baby steps to a freewheeling lifestyle, and how free can we realistically be? Any tips, insights or examples of families taking Tim’s advice? This is our question of the day! Thank you!

I would like to know as best he can give, what Tim’s average non-mini-retirement day entails?

From one of the quotes in the book says somthing along the lines of “to increase your chance of success you must first double your rate of failure” with that idea in mind, I was wondering if he could give a recent example of a time that he has failed?

Also as a matter of interest how much his sales of brainQUICKEN and speedreading material have increased?

I did enjoy Tim’s book. So here is my question: how would you suggest you outsource parts of a consulting engineer job where face time with the client is important and most of your work requires interaction with your follow employees in person (aka: review of drawing is next to impossible remotely)?

I just requested this book through inter-library loan and am SO EXCITED to get it.

My question is:
I am almost 24. I started a green energy business successfully a few years ago, but learned the hard way what happens when you expand too quickly. I now have 18,000 in personal credit card debt – and want out. What is your advice about CH 7 bankruptcy? I think my choices are that or finding an investor.

Thank you for writing this book, & THANK YOU for writing this blog!! I share it with everyone.

I’d like to know if he’s kept the business that originally let him live this lifestyle (I’m guessing he’s made some signiifcant money off the book).

Also if he were to start all over from scratch similar to Adam Shepard what would he do? How would he go about finding the resources, suppliers, industries that could allow him to duplicate his efforts. I guess I’m curious how his entrepreneurial mind/approach works.

Working less and focusing on quality of work rather than quantity of hours logged is great advice; however, I’m not sure if it holds water for the masses in the real world where employers pay by the hour or require that you be available during regular hours. Unless you work for yourself, telecommute, or your profession can be broken into a series of projects, you can’t really escape the 9 to 5. I’ll be taking a look at Ferriss’ book to see what he has to say. Great recommendation!

Tim: When you spend a mini-retirement abroad, how do you build connections with local people? I spent a summer in Holland and found it difficult to connect with people. I ended up internet dating my way through Amsterdam!

For my next mini, I’m thinking about Buenos Aires, one of your favorites, but also Cape Town & Sydney/Melbourne. Any thoughts?

As a professor at a research university, I found your book very applicable and great for thinking about my life. Thanks!

Reading the first few chapters pushed us to think again about what we really want and what we can do to move in that direction now. We’ve been doing big picture planning regularly, anyway, but the book is so brash that what we want seems pretty tame and doable in comparison, so why not go for it?

I echo some of the questions about what might be different about the book’s advice for people who have dependents (I have a stay-at-home spouse with pre-existing medical conditions and 2 young children), and when we need to live in a particular geographic area for family reasons. If there’s more to say when risks affect more people, I’m all ears.

I may be the exception but a stable paycheck and 9-5 job sounds great to me. I would be stressed all of the time if I had to worry about how I would pay my mortgage/rent next month or 6 months from now. I want to know how Tim deals with uncertainty and risk.

@17 Brad:
Software development can be automated, as it see it, even if your job is to produce custom software, if you look at it as producing ‘custom’ software for a customer with multiple potential sites.

As example from a relative who does custom software – he was asked by one fast food franchise owner to develop a program that he could enter in accounting and stock. But of course there are hundreds if not thousands of these franchises nationwide, so once you have developed this product for one, you have a lot of potential clients to market it to automatically. So you can develop programs that are applicable to one client in a specific industry, then market them to other potential clients in the same industry, thereby using the same work over and over for different customers. To take this approach further – hire a ‘marketing intern’ to market your product to these clients, minimizing your involvement in the transaction. My dad does this using college students working for course credit to market his services.

That is just my opinion and I am not Tim Ferriss, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

what I’d like to know is what recommendations does he have for people who would prefer to save and invest of (or as well as) creating muses. More specifically, where would he save/invest his money if he had say $150,000 saved up.

@Chris Kilber (#26)
If Tim doesn’t own a cell phone, he does a pretty good impression. I once conducted an hour-long interview with him as he drove to the post office, etc. — using a cell phone. (In fact, it was this very interview for which I solicited questions.)

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